Welcome to the Real World

Welcome to the Real World helen thompson, Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2017), pp. 368, cloth, $59.95. There is a famous scene in the Wachowskis’ 1999 film, The Matrix, that has become a beloved meme of conspiracy theorists around the world. The rebel leader Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne, presents the hacker Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, with a choice of two pills: if he swallows the blue one, he can carry on living his normal life, believing whatever he wants about the strange glitches he keeps noticing in his experience of reality; if he takes the red one, he can take a tumble down the rabbit hole and learn the truth about what lies behind that reality. Needless to say, Neo picks the red one; the surface of a mirror into which he looks turns fluid at his touch and begins to envelop his body. The next moment he finds himself naked and hairless in a pink pod covered in a glutinous amniotic fluid, his brain and spinal cord attached by several thick wires to what looks like a gigantic computer server. Massive columns of identical pods stretch into the abyss in all directions around him. With the help of his crew, Morpheus unplugs Neo from the matrix’s simulation and hauls him aboard his airship, the Nebuchadnezzar: “Welcome to the real world,” he says grimly. The Matrix does not show up in Helen Thompson’s dense, demanding, and fascinating new book, Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel, but I could not help thinking of it as I made my way through her lucid exposition of Enlightenment ideas about “primary” and “secondary” qualities and their importance to the early English novel. Neo’s introduction to the matrix’s hardware vividly captures the bleak view of the physical world of objects that new materialists such as Jane Bennett and Karen Barad think we moderns have inherited from the Enlightenment. Philosophers from Descartes onward are accused of being conspiracy theorists, like Morpheus and his crew, who stripped the physical world of its sensuous complexity and vitality, reimagining it as a kind of giant simulation device made from particles that vary only in size, shape, texture, and motion. Thereafter, the story goes, the colors, smells, and flavors of the sensible world were no longer understood to belong to things themselves but came to be seen as merely secondary properties produced in the mind during sensation. Rather than liberate us from the matrix, like Morpheus, however, new materialists want to free us from the Enlightenment’s impoverished view of the physical world by restoring its vitality and phenomenological complexity. Thompson thinks such critiques rely on a fundamentally flawed understanding of Enlightenment ontology. In particular, they privilege its reductive atomist physics at the expense of the “corpuscular” chemistry from which John Locke, a student of Robert Boyle at Oxford, derived his influential distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Drawing on revisionist histories of science by William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Thompson shows that the corpuscle Boyle proposed as the foundational unit of matter was not the same as Epicurus’s atom, let alone the element of modern chemistry. Unlike the atom, the corpuscle was not indivisible, nor was it a purely mechanical entity. Although Boyle rejected the Aristotelian essentialism of the schools, his chemistry did not constitute an absolute break with the alchemical tradition. Corpuscles were composed of smaller particles that could be rearranged under certain conditions in such a way as to Novel: A Forum on Fiction 52:1 DOI 10.1215/00295132-7330254 Ó 2019 by Novel, Inc. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/52/1/136/567412/136drury.pdf by VILLANOVA UNIV user DRURY WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD 137 transmute one substance into another. Likewise, the properties of corpuscles were not limited to the purely “mechanical affections” of size, figure, texture, and motion; as Thompson shows, their behavior was sometimes ascribed to other, extramechanical powers, such as the attractive force that drew them together or hidden “seminal” influences that were said to cause the growth of molds on decaying plants and the appearance of metals from solvents. By recovering the ontological distinctiveness of the corpuscle, Thompson is able to challenge several of the basic assumptions established by canonical accounts of Enlightenment empiricism. Far from ruling out causal explanations and confining himself to the evidence of the senses, as Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer once argued, Boyle extended his inquiries deep into insensible micromatter. The empirical knowledge of air he acquired from his air-pump experiments, for example, hinged on what they revealed about a key physical property—“springiness”—of constituent particles that could not be perceived by the senses. Similarly, Enlightenment empiricists did not assume that particles of matter had fixed identities that existed independent of the sensations and ideas they generated in the mind. On the contrary, Thompson demonstrates that Boyle and Locke both understood the qualities of an object to depend on its relation with other objects, including the sensory organs of the bodies surrounding it. Just as the “Deleterious Faculty” of the crushed glass swallowed by a group of nuns, in Boyle’s rather macabre example, resulted from the collision of the sharp points and edges of the shards of glass with the soft tissue of the nuns’ stomachs, so the quality of any object depended on the interaction between its physical attributes and the senses of the person perceiving it. Like words in a linguistic system, therefore, corpuscular matter derived its identity from differences rather than essences—not from anything intrinsic to the corpuscle itself but from its relations with other, surrounding corpuscles. Locke was a skeptical student of seventeenth-century chemistry and questioned whether anything could really be known about matter’s primary qualities. Boyle’s claims about the springiness of the air—including his comparison of the texture of aerial corpuscles to that of wool fleeces— struck him as problematically reliant on figurative analogies between micro- and macromatter that made corpuscles “too much like everyday bodies” (75). But elsewhere in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, as Thompson deftly shows, he suggests that such analogies were actually the natural and normal effects of matter’s action on the senses. The theoretical sophistication of Thompson’s approach to empiricism also provides the foundations for a bold reconsideration of its relation to the “realism” of the early novel that departs significantly not just from classic studies by Ian Watt and Michael McKeon but from more recent work by John Bender, Cynthia Wall, and Jonathan Kramnick, among others. Like scientists, she argues, eighteenth-century novelists did not confine themselves to the knowledge individuals acquire directly through their senses; they also saw it as their job to evoke qualities—character, status, virtue, and so on—that could not be sensed. Like scientists, moreover, novelists did not see themselves as detached “modest witnesses” providing neutral transcriptions of an objective, stand-alone reality; what concerned them, Thompson argues, were the “forms, and figures, and experiences” through which physical reality acted on the senses to produce empirical knowledge. As a first, programmatic example, Thompson cites Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina, which she reads as a realist dramatization of the way the identities of women in patriarchal societies are produced not by anything internal to them— the stable interiority of the unnamed “young Lady” who assumes various disguises to seduce the same man is sustained only from the “extra-empirical vantage of the narrator” (110)—but Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/52/1/136/567412/136drury.pdf by VILLANOVA UNIV user 138 NOVEL MAY 2019 externally, from the environments and circumstances in which they are placed and the physical attributes they present to “the sensoria of the men who wish to enjoy them” (108). Thompson’s superb readings of Boyle, Locke, and Haywood take up the introduction and first two chapters of the book. Subsequent chapters analyze early eighteenth-century fictional narratives in light of different applications of the period’s corpuscular empiricism: thus she reads Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year through corpuscular medical theory; pairs adventure fictions by William Chetwood and Penelope Aubin with theories of color and racial difference; compares the representation of status inconsistency in Fielding’s early novels to alchemical ideas about transmutation; and situates Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Richardson’s Clarissa in relation to pneumatic chemistry (the science of gases). The scientific excursions in these chapters are exhaustive and intricate, and the substance of their connection to the literary text is sometimes deferred so long that it can become a challenge to keep track of the argument. But the historical detail is always fascinating, and the interpretive insights, when they arrive, are consistently provocative. The chapter on Defoe’s Journal, for example, opens with a lengthy account of the new “chemical” medicine that began to challenge Galenic orthodoxy in the wake of the Great Plague of 1665, before tracing the influence of Boyle’s corpuscular doctrine of qualities on an etiology of disease that anticipated modern germ theory. Rejecting humoral explanations, Boyle and “chemical” physicians such as George Thomson and George Starkey proposed that disease was caused by minute, insensible “seeds” that made their way into the body through its pores and eventually began to produce the sensible symptoms that Galenic physicians typically viewed as the disease itself. Thompson thinks that Defoe is exploring the epistemological uncertainty generated by this medical theory in his depiction of the plague, which the narrator HF understands to implant itself in people externally through social encounters, without their knowing it and without producing any immediately sensible symptoms. As such, Defoe’s Journal models a “nascent narrative realism,” she argues, that plumbs the interior depths of character “not as psychology, not as bounded selfhood or transparent self-knowledge, but as the fatality that attends empirical understanding” (143). A recurring theme in these chapters is the disconcerting fungibility of personal qualities that might seem on the surface to be essential or inalienable. In her chapter on Fielding, therefore, Thompson is drawn to the hypocrites—Shamela, Mrs Slipslop, and Jonathan Wild—who manifest one set of traits (virtue, greatness, etc.) but actually possess the opposite ones (vice, petty criminality, and so on). The “alchemical imaginary” she identifies in his fiction is drawn from her analysis of the resemblance of these hypocrites to the substances operated on by alchemists who, according to the medieval tradition that survived in a modified corpuscular form deep into the eighteenth century, were able to transmute base metal into gold by revealing the antipathetic elemental qualities concealed within the manifest ones. What attracts Thompson’s attention in the travel fictions of Chetwood and Aubin, on the other hand, are the moments of “slippage” when an implicit ontology of race secured by stable differences in climate or female chastity suddenly appears to be the contingent product of variable relations and circumstances. Thompson traces these slippages back to similar uncertainties in Boyle’s and Newton’s competing theories of light and color and later eighteenthcentury efforts to explain differences in human skin color. Since skin was the same substance the world over, it was thought that the cause of these differences had to lie beyond the corpuscle, in the pressure of the surrounding air, perhaps, or the arrangement of skin’s component parts, or in variations of the thickness and opacity of its membranes. At the Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/52/1/136/567412/136drury.pdf by VILLANOVA UNIV user DRURY WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD 139 same time, as Thompson notes, there was nothing superficial about these contingent differences, since they were thought quite sufficient to justify slavery and colonialism. As evidence for his claim that black skin resulted from its greater thickness, for example, the anatomist John Mitchell pointed to the darkened, calloused hands of manual laborers—an allusion that Thompson thinks betrays the way dark skin was thought to sustain “the preemptive vindication of its bearer’s capacity for labor” (172). Some of Thompson’s readings are more compelling than others. The analysis of Swift’s “Lady poems” in the final chapter makes much more effective use of the corpuscular “effluvia” that was said to produce smells than does the discussion of female virtue’s ontological instability in Clarissa later in the same chapter. Likewise, the representation of Fielding as a scolding critic of status inconsistency who uses burlesque and typographical errors to arrest the debasement of literary standards misses, to my mind, the ambivalence of his attitude toward “high” literary culture, which in Jonathan Wild, especially, is as much the target of mock-heroic ridicule as any of its modern corruptions. A skeptical reader might also object to the tenuousness of some of the connections Thompson makes between science and fiction—which often hinge on fugitive allusions rather than on sustained linguistic correspondences, let alone on direct lines of influence or interaction. But if the book dispenses with some of the norms of historicist criticism, this is because it has a bigger prize in its sights, which is the deep structure of figuration linking physical reality to the ideas we have about it common to both science and fiction. Where other studies of scientific and literary realism insist, like Morpheus, on the primacy of stripped-down physical coordinates in such a way as to relegate fiction to second-class status, moreover, Thompson suggests that novels are actually more realistic than science because they “make explicit the production of empirical reality as the reader’s encounter with forms and powers that enable sensational knowledge” (20). Fiercely intelligent, erudite, and dazzlingly original, Fictional Matter raises the bar for the study of science and literature and brings a new rigor to the theory of the early novel’s epistemological and ontological foundations. joseph drury, Villanova University * * * joseph drury is associate professor of English at Villanova University and author of Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain (2017). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/52/1/136/567412/136drury.pdf by VILLANOVA UNIV user